"Our inability to understand intuitively the actions and gestures of people from other cultures is hardwired into our brains" is how the Financial Times describes the conclusions reached by researchers from the University of California into the "mirror neuron network" (FT is subscription only, so here's a free access article from Science Daily which covers the same press release), a set of nerve cells that fire not only when we perform an action but also when we watch someone else performing the same action. Apparently the mirror neuron network responded differently when subjects watched gestures being made by someone from their own culture and someone from a foreign culture.
"Culture has a measurable influence on our brain and as a result on our behaviour", says Istvan Molnar- Szakacs, a member of the team.
Which comes as something of a relief to those of us who make a living from explaining cultural differences and have to defend ourselves from time to time from people who hate anything that smacks of cultural determinism and say things like "I don't sense any cultural differences. We are all human beings. You just need to be sensitive to others and polite" etc. Not that I disagree with these statements, and sometimes I find myself saying similar things when people get too wound up about etiquette.
In another sense it is bad news for us, because it may also mean that it is very hard to train someone to understand the gestures and feelings of a person from another culture or to use gestures which will be correctly interpreted by someone from another culture.
